How does ‘zoning out’ work?
In: Biology
One of the big take-homes from cognitive neuroscience is this: There’s way too much stuff coming at you to really make sense of, unless you ignore most of it. Visual input alone is overwhelming. Think about how many individual objects and lines and shapes are in the room around you right now. You can’t really pay attention to all of them at once, because brains don’t have that kind of processing power. Now imagine you can’t filter out the hum of heating/air conditioning or other quiet background noise, or the way the room smells, or the feeling of your clothes on your skin or your tongue in your mouth. It would be chaos.
The solution is to ignore most of it, and have a good system for picking up on the little bit of stuff that matters. This is what attention basically is, and you need a complicated brain system to decide what to pay attention to. The freaky thing is that you’re kind of blind to things you don’t pay attention to. People with certain kinds of strokes or brain injuries can lose the ability to pay attention to the left half of their surroundings, even when the senses are still working fine. This results in really weird stuff like running into the same wall repeatedly because it just doesn’t click that there’s anything there, or not eating food on the left side of a plate even when hungry.
“Zoning out” involves the default mode network (DMN), which is sort of the opposite of paying attention. The DMN is a collection of brain areas which work together more when you’re resting and not really paying attention to anything. This includes a lot of the stuff that makes us human: Thinking about what the future holds, remembering the past, thinking about how you’re feeling right now, thinking about relationships with others and how they’re feeling. Because you’re cranking down attention to your surroundings, it’s like cranking down vision and hearing and so on. The good news is that your attention system can usually snap you back in as needed (someone calls your name, your finger is touching something very hot, a hungry lion jumps out of the bushes.)
TL;DR: You only have so much brainpower. “Zoning out” means spending it on thinking about stuff that isn’t in front of you.
Not exactly a ELI5 subject: but “Zoning out” is referred to as the activation of the brain’s “default more network” a sort of waking stand in for the normally reserved sleep process of “synaptic homeostasis” (organizing the brains dendrites). It essentially helps the brain/body orchestration remain general and invariant. Allowing for things like creativity and abstraction.
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